Arvind Narayanan's journal

To feel the true power of gnome-vfs you have to use it in conjunction with ssh-keygen. And to feel the true power of ssh-keygen you have to use it in conjunction with gnome-vfs. I've been taking some of this power for granted in the last few months, but when I took a step back and thought about it I realized how awesome all of this truly is. Some examples:

I literally have around a terabyte of disk space.

Rhythmbox transparently shows me music from five different computers where I have user accounts as part of a single library.

I work on typesetting and programming both from home and school. I don't have to worry about moving files around or version control any more.

My dream device for the near future is a wifi-storage interface to a HUGE disk. Probably, think like apple, and shape it into some funky looking cube or a 'belt' that you can wear. All my devices -- camera, mobile, music player, video player, etc.,. will be able to access this device over the air. Imagine.

Yours will probably come true pretty soon, although it will probably be flash based rather than hard drive based (memory cost/capacity projections show flash overtaking magnetic media in the next few years). It is a purely technological problem, and there's market demand for it (portable movie player).

WiFi is more of an economic problem. The only hope seems to be a community wireless network.

Earlier, if I wanted to work on remote files (that are not NFS exported) without making a local copy, I'd have to use a remote X session, which is (and will always be) too slow to be usable on anything but a LAN because most programs make an insane number of round trips between the X client and server. Now I can work with local programs on remote files, which is way faster because only file operations require a (single) round trip.